The headline results are , but he's put booze up by a bit, hit gas-guzzling cars a bit (down the line) but not by enough to put you off if you can afford a Range Rover and put in tiny amounts of money to "good things" like child benefit and fuel handouts to pensioners.
Corporation tax is due to be reduced from 30p in the pound to 28p, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (although the Treasury will get the money back somehow).
And, at first view, there isn't anything else.
The experts think the net effect will be £2bn more in tax receipts, I suspect that will increase when the Budget book is published later this week and we find that allowances aren't rising at all even as inflation does.
He's cut back his forecast for growth in the economy by a quarter point (from 2.5% to just over 2%) and is prepared to let extra borrowing take the strain, sensible with a recession looming.
All in all, a pretty impressive effort, especially so as he seems to have managed to exclude any Brown-ite so-called giveaways that turn out to be stealth taxes in disguise.
Don't count your chickens yet though.
I'd still have liked something a bit more dramatic, like a "windfall" tax on energy companies because they really do deserve a smack for ripping off poorer customers and, if their stories are to be believed, completely misreading the energy market.
But Darling knows he's got a few fights with business to come. BAA (formerly British Airports Authority) won an amazingly generous settlement yesterday on its landing charges, much to the fury of the airlines at Heathrow and Gatwick.
But it still says it's not enough, presumably because it's worked out it's likely to go bust in about a year's time.
Then the government, in particular one Gordon Brown, will be in the dock for allowing a consortium of Spanish construction companies to buy a huge piece of the country's infrastructure with £9bn of expensively borrowed (and, at the moment, un-refinancable) money.
So Darling's keeping his powder dry.
All he needs to do now is persuade that nice Mervyn King at the Bank of England cut interest rates by half a point.
Now that really is a challenge.
Stephen Foster is a former news editor of 北京赛车pk10, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.